Couple makes $100,000/month through self-publishing

Thanks for sharing, have to watch later firewall got it

Thanks for sharing. I have also four books out there but not marketed them yet.

Interesting... I can tell they were already a very passionate couple. But hey, their sex is about to get all the more better very soon :p

How many pages do these books usually run? I've never tried writing a full blown book/ebook, but I'm sure I could do it

Thanks for sharing the story. It's the new age where a regular person can literally change their life, almost overnight. They are making $100,000 per month...very impressive.

It is very inspiring to see this stuff. I had an idea about a year ago and published Fifty Shades of Bacon at the end of August using Createspace. It is a silly little book and I came out with a second "erotic Cookbook" called Chocogasms a few months later.

After being on the market for about a year, it still is bringing in income and I am really interested to see how it will do this Xmas season. I really worked my butt off on that one and I am pretty proud of the sales.

Good for them, the internet has been an incredible asset when it comes to average Joe's who would never get published by traditional publishers. Websites like Youtube and Amazon have made it easy for everyday folks to reach an audience that they would have never been to reach years ago.

The internet has been one of the greatest inventions of all time IMO

There IS power in numbers, and certainly platforms like Amazon have completely changed the game, but think about the following:

1. You have to be able to write pretty well
2. You have to enjoy writing enough to be able to put out the requisite amount of books, stories, etc.
3. You have to have the discipline to be able to make yourself sit at the keyboard even when you don't want to.
4. You have to have a story to tell.

Not too many people have all four. My wife is a romance novelist and when I think of all the groups she joined as she was coming up, all the people who "wanted to be writers" that never got even one book finished... It's just not as easy as it sounds.

Its a great story... Show what people can do if the ground beneath them starts vanishing.. Everyone need a start. and that can be self motivational or some insane events, but the result or the outcome must be a good one.

It's possible to make money as a best-seller author, but the odds are against it. Most of the books on Amazon sell less than one copy per day. Some don't sell copies for months.

i'm just about to get into self-publishing. i'm on my 6th chapter. this is an inspiration. thank you

I believe one of the reasons they succeeded was due to the sheer urgency of needing to make a lot of money in a short period of time.

People who owe a lot of money, or need to raise a huge sum of money within a short time or risk losing their homes or lives usually succeed... Because they have nothing to lose and are willing to sacrifice everything else to succeed.

I'm sure if we all used that kind of pressure on ourselves we can do it too )

This is very inspirational, i will start publishing my own book soon. thanks for sharing

Thanks for the share - very much appreciated. I'm on the way but not reached the lofty heights that this couple have.

KenJ

I need to finish a book. I have started so many, but get de-motivated by the massive task as it unfolds. Maybe this will motivate me...maybe.

it's a nice story, but forgive me for being a bit skeptical. they did it all with "word of mouth" really?? who did they tell? they are smart enough to get on the tv news, but they only did word of mouth marketing? i doubt it.

This is a great story for those of us who are looking into self publishing.

Does anyone know of any free tutorials to help a newbie along?

I read their first book (Big Girls Do It Better). It was VERY short, no real character development or pre/post-story. Just detailed sex scenes (two of them). In the video they even explain how they, admittedly, copied 50 Shades of Gray. So I guess if you're into writing/reading these kind of stories then there's a big market for it (considering Kindle owners, I'd guess, are primarily middle-aged women). So if you're looking to publish ANYTHING to the Amazon Kindle store, it should be relevant to that demographic.

Hi there, thanks for sharing this! Maybe the reason for their success is the fact that they obviously were highly-motivated and pressured, and so they did their very best to write good, saleable material.

They are an example of low quality writers making it big. This is what the Internet has done. It has given the little guy with not so great talents an opportunity.

Really? The reality is that there are 100 stories of people getting into debt and eventually losing everything to this one story of a couple going all out to significantly change their lives. The reason that it is so newsworthy is because it is so rare.

Although there is plenty of opportunities on Kindle, I can already see it getting more and more challenging to maintain sales. Just my personal experience.

Much Success,

JoeMack

There are a couple of very important points to "how" this overnight success happened and what it would take to duplicate it (which I personally believe very few people are really willing to do...)

1. Massively motivated...way too many people I talk with "want" to write a book or become a writer, but they don't have anywhere near the pain or ugency this couple had

2. Looked at what was already working...subtle point, but the days that this couple spent scouring the top sellers gave them valuable insights into patterns, trends, genres, on what was already leading the top sellers list. Had they ignored this step, they may have wasted months of writing before they figured out what they were writing wasn't selling. She then wrote her first book using a leading seller formula that was "like XYZ but with her own twist") Following the money trail is critical.

3. Extreme Action -- 20 titles in 6-months, most days not even taking a shower is over and above what 99.9% of people are willing to do...yet this level of obsession is often the trait of any successful entrepreneur (the stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates spending night after night in their offices are well published).

4. Didn't stop -- even when they quickly achieved an income level to pay their bills, they remained as obsessed. This is critical, it was after they had achieved their immediate needs that they hit it big with their #1 bestseller which is how they went to 1 Million ebooks and achieved their current $100K/month level. Again, most people would have stopped when they achieved enough to pay their bills and get out of debt.

In short, I'm convinced that anyone could replicate their success - even eclipse it by varying their self-publishing approach (away from Kindle) if they were willing to follow the 4 steps above...but my experience shows there are very few people that will.

Jeff

I really liked this story. However, it again raised the question in my mind whether self-publishing can be equally profitable for people who are not targeting the erotica niche? I want to write books, but lately I keep seeing that every damn popular book in the market is an erotica, the only books that ever stand out are mostly written by the elites. Even if you check out any best-sellers list right now, 5 out of the top 10 will be erotica, the other 5 will be those elites with recent releases like Stephen King, Khaled Hosseini, Dan Brown, and Neil Gaiman.

I don't know if it all started with 50 shades of grey or what. I wasn't in touch with the literary scene for the past year and a half, and now I see most book covers have headless women standing or lying down with a masculine hand holding some random part of their body. What if a guy has some special action/crime or a fantasy or even a completely heartbreaking story of real life struggles, seems like all those horny women out there won't pay a dime for that? Actually, fantasy is a wanted niche as well these days. After all, who can ignore all those nymphets out there who are waiting for their vampire in shiny skin riding a werewolf.

The power of the written word. Only if I could write lol.

Of course you need to be a seasoned "master writer" to write a master-piece such as 50 Shades of Gray

Well anyone can do it if they research what genre they want to enter and you know... take action to write the book.

I'm sure the quality of Kindle books has gone down but if people are buying trash then there is clearly a market for that caliber of writing. I doubt Amazon is going to raise the bar if people keep buying!

Haven't seen the video due to a firewall block? Found it on YouTube

Great find! I love this kind of stuff!

Thanks for sharing this interesting article. I personally feel the key is still to create the kind of content that people are willing to read. I feel writing a novel is not easy as it is an art. But the key is being persistent in continuously writing till it hits results.

So here I am, wasting my great and glorious 1,000th Warrior Forum post (which is supposed to be a veritable tome of valuable information and full-on biography about how the WF has changed me for the better over the last 999 posts) to ask the OP and others to please stop posting stuff like this here.

Sheesh.

Ain't nobody needs to know just how lucrative romance fiction is.

Well worth taking the time to watch, if you are considering fiction.

Interview with Indie Bestsellers Jack and Jasinda Wilder | Fictive Universe

Please note that they wrote a lot, they wrote smart, AND they did their research...

For example, at minute 23 - they took thirty days and read thru the top 100 in Amazon... Note folks, they READ, they didn't just use the Look Inside feature ;-)

Minute 24 - They had 8 books that didn't sell well, BUT, they didn't give up...

Thank you for sharing this...
very interesting.

That's an intense workload - but as any entrepreneur know that is what it takes to be successful.

The moral of the story is Get a Girlfriend. They can be profitable too.

really well done, well done!